Bernay Terres de Normandie (FR)

Inhabited milieu's challenges

The Charentonne and Risle valleys (whose mouth is located in the Seine estuary) structure the territory of the Bernay-Terres de Normandie intercommunality. Their narrow alluvial plains, mainly occupied by floodable meadows and framed by steep, wooded hillsides, have also been the site of an urbanization focused on industrial production that exploited the energy of the waterways. The urban centers that punctuate these valleys are now experiencing contradictory and unsustainable dynamics:

- An industrial decline, leaving a legacy of unoccupied or underutilized wastelands, to be reintegrated into the territory.
- A residential decline, resulting in the peri-urbanization of the towns, which keeps the inhabitants away from employment and services.

The more general context of the climate transition and the evolution of European regulations on limiting the artificialization of land, or even its renaturation, requires a rethinking of land development in terms of sobriety and resi- lience.Thus, reinvesting wastelands is an opportunity to give back living spaces to the inhabitants, while contributing to the development and attractiveness of the territory.At the same time, and in rural areas in particular, this constitutes a major challenge.
The sites proposed for the competition have their own characteristics, but all of them border or are crossed by rivers.The Risle and Charentonne rivers, which structure the identity of the territory and are real living resources, link the town centers and the wastelands, giving the landscape and the environment a central place in the urban fabric. The projects submitted by the candidates will therefore contribute to revealing the important potential of attractiveness and development of these valleys by rehabilitating areas abandoned by production and by enhancing the living interfaces with the natural landscapes.

Questions to the competitors

The actors of this multi-site wish to draw up a coherent global strategy based on the green and blue framework of the valleys to imagine new ways of living in this territory. How can we let the rivers regain their position in the urban ecosystem in order to relearn how to live with water, its qualities and its risks? How can we make inhabitants rediscover the beauty and pleasures of water (hidden or privatized for a long time), how can we use it to balance the impacts of climate change, support the desire for nature and promote well-being in the city? How can we conserve the specific biodiversity that has developed in spaces abandoned by man and take advantage of it to renew the city?
It is also necessary to change the way we look at vacant spaces and to include their revitalization in the long history of the territory’s transformation, where the alternation of «productive» phases and times of « break « allows for collective reflection and experimentation of new uses and spatial forms. How can we reimagine the town centers of the valley floor based on these opportunities? What alternatives to suburbanization can we imagine for this terri- tory and with what qualities of living? How can we best develop the soil resource and preserve the ecosystemic and cultural services provided to the city, in order to make it more resilient to climate change and to the socio-economic upheavals that impact the territories?
Within a «circular» approach to land use development, it is also necessary to take into account the specificities of existing facilities.The sites proposed to the competition differ in terms of their size and period of building, the activities they host and the spatial qualities that result from them, their state of conservation, etc. How can we take advantage of what is already there to imagine articulations between the productive city and the living city? How can we take care of the built space, reinterpreting it to preserve the individual and collective memories that have been stratified in these places?